A language learners’ forum

Challenge XXVI - Aug 2017

Starts: Tuesday, 1st Aug 2017 00h00m01s your time
Ends: Monday, 11th Sep 2017 23h59m59s your time

The 6 Week Challenge is a challenge to upgrade your language skills in one language from beginner to something more worthwhile, and to see if you can find more time to study languages when competing with other participants in a global highscore. 6 Week Challenges start on February 1st, May 1st, August 1st and November 1st every year, so there is a rough 6 weeks on / 6 weeks off pattern. Note that you can only do the 6 Week Challenge with a language that you're a beginner at or lower-intermediate at most. This allows for a more just comparison between participants.

More about the Challenge here

The bot is already taking registrations. Join us now!

6 Week Challenge Winners (2011-2017) - List of past winners and runners-up kindly created by Teango.

Sprachprofi wrote
The bot only knows ISO-639-1 languages.

ISO 639-1 codes here

The three tags #ie #multilingual #linguistics which are all grouped together as "Multilingual" on the scoreboard can be used if you don't want to differentiate between several languages.

Also available are: Nahuatl, Ancient Greek, #ASL, #Cantonese. I don't know what the tags are for the first two.

Link to last Challenge, May 2017

What language are you signing up with? What do you hope to achieve in these 6 weeks? Tell us!

I'm starting this thread earlier this time because RDearman's study starts at about the same time, and I'm wondering what people's plans are. Giving up 6WC due to duplicate work? Doing both since one is keeping time records anyway? Keeping time records on RD's spreadsheet and reporting the totals from there to the 6WC? Something else?

A thread about tracking: Tracking spreadsheets?

The Czech study group also starts when RD's study starts.

I'm signing up with Russian again. I will mostly be reading with LWT and I'm hoping to get to ~30-35,000 known word forms. At my current rate that's totally doable. Also, if I possibly can I would like to finish the first 5 books of the fantasy series I'm reading. 3 novels left of about 250 pages, but that depends largely on how my reading speed develops. Might be more, might be less.

As for your question: I'm not taking part in RDearman's study, but the question still applies because I'm using my own spread-sheet to track my language learning too. I always use both during the 6WC and my own spreadsheet gathers less detailed stats, but is better adapted to my own goals. They actually complement each other nicely.

Signing up to French! My very first challenger. Aiming to reach the intermediate level. Or a decent reading level.

Signed up for Tibetan. My teacher will be on vacation - so this will be interesting period. I'm a proper beginner.
And I'll be double tracking with the study, maybe it will motivate me to write that app I was thinking about that will do everything ....

My language objective is to get a solid handle on the alphabet, spelling out loud practice (it is specific to the language) and the first 15 lessons in Colloquial Tibetan.

Did Dialang tests for Greek just now, and got B1 in all 5 papers That's around 280 hours of study plus background listening sometimes, and a Cat IV language Was thinking of doing Swedish for the 6WC, but with these very encouraging results, nothing can tear me away from Greek now! Except maybe Turkish or Vietnamese, and wasn't I considering Russian... Gotta hide that Assimil Japanese I borrowed yesterday... Oh look they're doing Czech over there...

Signing up with Quechua (Ayacucho Peruvian). Hoping to get to a level where I can hold basic conversations in preparation for my trip to Peru in November. This will be my first 6wc

smallwhite wrote:I'm wondering what people's plans are. Giving up 6WC due to duplicate work? Doing both since one is keeping time records anyway? Keeping time records on RD's spreadsheet and reporting the totals from there to the 6WC? Something else?

To answer my own question, I'm participating both in RD's Study and in this 6WC. I've made a compromise between 3 spreadsheets - my normal one, my 6WC one and Zenmonkey's one. Luckily, for my own tracking purposes, I'm really only interested in Total Hours Studied for each language, and I don't really care how much of that is Listening or Textbook or whatnot. So it's really only the requirements of RD's Study that I have to fulfill, and Zenmonkey has kindly laid everything out for that.

Is the bot broken? It doesn't look like any of my tweets today have been picked up.

Yes I'm experiencing issues as well.